Learning with Young Minds

I love the rainy season and everything that comes with it: relaxing at home when it is pouring, walking by the beach when it is drizzling, feeling the raindrops on your face and even drawing ‘the monsoon’ pictures with my LO. It was while making one of such drawings that we started talking about the shape of a raindrop 💧. Or at least the shape that is usually drawn. Is it an oval? Is it a sphere? Is it a cone? No. It looks very different than all these simple shapes. Then we thought it might be a combination of two shapes. A circle plus a triangle in 2D. Draw a circle and put a triangle on top of it. Colour it and you have a raindrop. Similarly, you can create the raindrops in 3D with a sphere and a cone. As you can imagine, the discussions with kids never end when the things are still simple and explainable. So, we progressed to the number of angles and sides the shape of a raindrop has. Well, if we are drawing a triangle at the top, there is one angle. And the number of sides? Now...

  Once upon a time, there were two sticks. One always stood straight and the other one bowed. And their shadows told some interesting information about ... TIME! So, we decided to compare their shadows on the day of the Equinox.   The last time (check the previous post ), we tracked the shadows using a simple Sundial where a stick (pencil) is fixed in the vertical upright position. Though the shadows were moving in the clockwise direction (fortunately ), the hourly gaps were not equidistant. So, tracking time seemed quite difficult! For this second observation, we prepared a horizontal sundial to compare the findings with our earlier sundial. (The making of this horizontal sundial is based on https://www.sundials.co.uk/projects ) Though it is not as simple as fixing a vertical stick, it is not very difficult either. To keep the project simple, we used thermocol sheet for the base and the triangle, and a stick as gnomon. The stick (gnomon) should be parallel to the Earth’s...

This week we celebrated International Mother Language Day to show our love for our mother tongues. And now it is time to spread that love to the next generation. Not just by speaking with kids in the Indian languages, but also by teaching them how to read and write. Literacy gives entry to the literature. And literature is the mirror our culture, society and history. And we do want our kids to know their roots, don’t we? So, I am sharing a word scramble activity in three Indian languages, मराठी, हिंदी, and বাংলা . If you are wondering about the order of these languages, well, that’s the order in which I learned those languages. This activity is for early readers and does not have any संयुक्त अक्षर . The earlier letter recognition activities  with Google slideshow (Marathi) are ideal for kids who have just begun to learn the letters.   And here is your word scramble activity: Unscramble and Write . Have fun 😀😀

  Vasant Panchami or Basant Panchami marks the beginning of the spring season. This festival is a celebration of new life and learning. Goddess Saraswati, the goddess of knowledge, is worshiped in many parts of India during this festival. Let’s continue our learning with these spring-themed activities during this festival. Spring-themed Shadow Matching This google slideshow activity is fun for kids of all ages. All you have to do is open the file in the ‘present’ mode and choose the correct options! Enjoy this free resource – Spring Shadow Matching Spring-themed Coordinates Activities If you are a regular reader of this blog, you must have already guessed that we absolutely love 💓working on the coordinates activities! And here are some more. Spring Coordinates Activities . (Available for the subscribers. You can become a subscriber for free using the link on the home page.) These activities include drawing flowers with the coordinates.  This set also shows how to plot lin...